Tag Archives: Jim Butcher

So, judging from the traffic coming in this past day, people are very interested in the Dresden Files Role Playing Game preview sent to the playtesters a couple of days ago. I’m still working my way through the books (did I mention it’s almost 700 pages?), but I figured I’d do two things to help satisfy the desire for information.

First, I’m going to invite questions. Want to know something about the game? Leave a question in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer it. One proviso: I’m working from the preview and, while it’s fairly complete, there may still be some last-minute changes. From what I’ve seen, I doubt it, but you should know.

Second, I’m going to put a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the two books below, with a brief comment on what’s in each chapter. That’ll give you some idea of what to expect when the book comes out and you go buy it.

Because you are going to buy it, right? Right.

Volume One: Your Story

This book is about playing the game. It’s a combination of player book and GM book; the co-operative nature of setting up the game advocated in the book makes this a natural choice.

Chapter One: Harry’s World

This chapter gives a short overview of default game world, based on the Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher. It lays out some important concepts that you need to understand about the underlying assumptions of the world and game, including a section on Maxims of the Dresdenverse.

Chapter Two: The Basics

Here you get the bones of the FATE system, the modified version of FUDGEthat’s the engine driving the game. It covers the mechanics of your character sheet, the dice you roll, what they mean, and how to use Fate Points.

Chapter Three: City Creation

Part of the fun of playing DFRPG is creating the city to be a home base for the game. This chapter walks you through the steps, including showing you where in the process you create the PCs. The system is more structured and focused than the playtest version, and you wind up with a nice collection of aspects and NPCs for your city, as well as some good dynamic situations for your players to deal with.

Now, there’s a sidebar in this chapter that talks about how you don’t really have to do this step as a group with your players. They recommend doing it as a group, though, and so do I. Why? because that way you make sure that the city you build has all the pieces for the kinds of stories and conflicts that your players are interested in dealing with. And it’ll give you some interesting surprises throughout the process.

Chapter Four: Character Creation

In the previous chapter, they recommend that you do the character creation as part of the city creation, to help tie the characters more tightly into the setting. This is a good idea. They also recommend doing character creation as a group. I think this is essential for any FATE game. The novel phase of character creation pretty much demands it.

They also mention the idea of having the GM create a character, and I found this to be a great idea in the playtest. We had multiple playtest character generation sessions, and I created a number of NPCs this way. It gave me a nice stable of NPCs with ties to and history with the PCs. I’m going to go one step farther than their recommendation, though; I’m going to suggest holding a couple of extra character creation sessions to have your players help put together some NPCs.

Chapter Five: Types & Templates

This is where they list the different types of characters available, and what powers and stunts you need. The options outlined here are:

Pure Mortal

Champion of God

Changeling

Emissary of Power

Focused Practitioner

Knight of a Faerie Court

Lycanthrope

Minor Talent

Red Court Infected

Sorcerer

True Believer

Were-Form

White Court Vampire

White Court Virgin

Wizard

There’s also a discussion about what to do if you don’t want to play one of these archetypes, but instead want to play something different, like, say, a Ghoul. Really, it’s pretty easy and flexible.

Chapter Six: Advancement

I haven’t looked closely at this section yet, but along with the standard information about how the characters advance, there’s also a section on how your city advances, which I think is a brilliant idea.

Chapter Seven: Aspects

Aspects are the meat of the system. They’re what makes FATE work. The discussion in this chapter spells out everything you need to know about them, including the kinds of things that make good Aspects, and what I call the Aspect Trick – picking Aspects that do double or triple duty for you.

Chapter Eight: Skills

Not much to say about this chapter. It’s skills -Â the list of them, how to use them in different situations and for different purposes, stuff like that.

Chapter Nine: Mortal Stunts

Stunts are what give mortals their edge in the game. The way things balance, mortals will be the ones with the most stunts available to them. These are usually special ways to use some skills, or a different thing you can spend a Fate Point on, little things like that. Nothing huge, but stunts can really add flavour and variety to a character.

The chapter consists of three pages of rules for creating your own stunts, and then about nine pages of example stunts. This is very nice; one of the things my group had asked for during playtest was an expanded list of example stunts. And Evil Hat came through in spades.

Chapter Ten: Supernatural Powers

The counterpart to the stunts of the previous chapter, supernatural powers are the extra gravy you get for playing a supernatural character – the things that set you apart. These are expensive, and really cut into the Refresh Rate of Fate Points. This is the primary balance mechanic between mortal and supernatural characters, the thing that lets you play a Karin Murphy alongside a Harry Dresden. There’s about thirty pages of these, and it covers a wide enough range to let you build just about anything you want.

Chapter Eleven: Playing the Game

This section covers pretty much the entire mechanics of the game – it’s about thirty pages (well, twenty-eight), and handles actions and physical, mental, and social conflicts. Except for spellcasting, this is all the system you need. The system is great for running very cinematic, action-packed scenes, and we found that physical conflicts were threatening enough that the players were worried every time one came up that their characters would die. This is, I think, important for a game – there needs to be some risk, or success and failure stop mattering. It also led to some great roleplaying, as players (and characters) did their best to figure out ways to avoid the risk of combat, sometimes even just running away.

Chapter Twelve: Living With Magic

Here’s where the nature and flavour of magic in the Dresdenverse are laid out. Here, you find out about things like hexing, The Sight, soulgazing, the Laws of Magic, Thresholds, and Wizard biology and senses. The next chapter tells you how magic works, but this is the chapter that tells you how magic feels.

Chapter Thirteen: Spellcasting

It’s a game about modern magic, based on a series of books with a Wizard for a main character. You better bet that spellcasting gets some love, here. I’ve already talked a little about how the system has been changed to bring spellcasters into balance with the other character types. There have been a couple of other things added that really fill in some gaps: first, along with Evocation and Thaumaturgy, they’ve added a section on Sponsored Magic, which is essentially what you get when you make a bargain with a demon or a god. Second, they’ve included a nice list of examples of all the different things discussed in the chapter: evocations, thaumaturgical rituals, focus items, enchanted items, and potions. Very useful, because this is the most complex part of the game.

Chapter Fourteen: Running the Game

This is the GM chapter, and covers the GM side of all the things spelled out in other parts of the book. As is usual with Evil Hat stuff, it’s solid, useful, and detailed. The advice is practical and insightful, everything focused on telling a good story with the game.

Chapter Fifteen: Building Scenarios

One of my favourite bits of Spirit of the Century is the section on building adventures. This chapter does at least as good a job, showing how to build the kinds of situations and events you see in the Dresden Files books. It’s all about connections, in this game, tying you into the city and characters you’ve already created, so that everyone has an emotional investment in what’s going on.

Chapter Sixteen: Nevermore/Baltimore

All through the city-building chapter, they use the example of Dresdenifying the city of Baltimore. Here, they give you the results of of the fleshed-out example, a ready-to-play city for your use.

After this, there follows a glossary and index, as well as copies of the various forms and sheets used in the game. The index isn’t filled in, yet, but the rest of the stuff is complete and useful.

Volume Two: Our World

This is the setting book for the game, though some of the setting elements are covered in Volume One. As I said previously, you cold probably play the game without this book, but I think you’re really going to want it. Especially if you’re a fan of the books.

It looks like the book is going to open with a new story by Jim Butcher; for now, they have the short story Restoration of Faith as a placeholder.

Chapter One: Old World Order

Here we’ve got the low-down on the various power groups in the Dresdenverse and how they relate to one another. There’s a detailed discussion of the Unseelie Accords, as well as a lovely little section called Supernatural Conflicts That Could Kill You RIGHT NOW. Fun stuff.

Chapter Two: What Goes Bump

This chapter has a complete, detailed, statted roster of monsters, spellcasters, animals, and mortals. This does double-duty, both as a section of adversaries, and as a blueprint for building characters. It also has a very useful little list of how the various different supernatural baddies stack up against each other, so you can answer that vital question, “Who would win in a fight between a Faerie Queen and a Dragon?”

Chapter Three: Who’s Who

And this is where you find all your favourite characters from the Dresden Files. And the ones you love to hate. And the ones you’ve completely forgotten about. This section is amazingly complete – even if you never play the game, if you’re a fan of the Dresden Files, this book is a wonderful guide to the world.

Chapter Four: Occult Chicago

Carrying on in that theme, here we have Harry’s city: Chicago, in all it’s supernatural glory. Yeah, that’s right. Between the two books, you get two, fully-worked up cities, in case you don’t want to create your own, or if you need some inspiration. Because of the wealth of source material in the series, Chicago is a little more fleshed-out than Baltimore, and it’s got a lot of good information for play.

That’s it. After that, you get the index.

So, there’s the look at the two volumes of the game. I gotta say, it’s impressing me more and more as I read through it. It’s good stuff. I can’t wait to buy my hard copies this summer.

But that’s enough out of me. What are you folks interested in? What questions can I answer? Let me know, and I’ll do my best.

Yesterday, those of us who were lucky enough to be part of the Dresden Files Role Playing Game playtest received a special treat from Fred Hicks of Evil Hat: .pdf copies of the (mostly) finished game.

Guess what I spent last night reading?

I’m not done yet, but I wanted to talk a little bit about my first impressions of the game. Keep in mind that not everything in these files is quite complete; of particular note, the introductions and indices are blank, the short fiction by Jim Butcher isn’t in there yet, none of the page references are completed (page XX), and a few – but not really all that many, from my initial look – pieces of art are missing. That said, here are my initial observations.

The books are gorgeous. The layout is attractive and readable. It’s busy without being distracting or illegible. The marginal notes are a nice touch, being comments from Harry Dresden, Billy the Werewolf, and Bob the Skull from the game world. They entertain, give insight into the game world, and help to clarify some rules points.

The books are big. Combined, we’re talking about nearly 700 pages. Now, from my initial glance, it seems like you might not actually need the Our World book, as all the rules for actually playing exist in the Your Story book. Having said that, the Our World book contains all the statted creatures and characters that you might want for running the game. For example, you can create a changeling character using only the Your Story book by making up the powers and abilities of a fey of a given type in conjunction with the GM, but the Our World book will give you a list of different types of fey and their powers and abilities, so you don’t have to do that work. And it’s always nice, speaking as a GM, to have a bunch of statted NPCs to throw into the game spur of the moment. You might not need Our World, but I really, really think you’re going to want it. Especially if your a Harry Dresden fan, just as a reference book for the world.

City building is substantially fleshed out, with more detail and structure, to help you create the kind of setting you want to play in. The running example is Baltimore, and it turns into a very interesting place as it gets Dresdenified.*

The section I went to pretty much right away was Spellcasting. See, during the early playtests, Wizard characters pretty much walked all over other character types, not so much because of their powerful, but because they were so flexible. A Wizard could, with a little time and effort, be great at anything, which caused them to overshadow other characters from time to time. The specific issue was with Thaumaturgy, which lets Wizards do pretty much anything they can imagine. I wanted to see if this was dealt with in the final version.

It is dealt with. Wizards still have their signature flexibility, but the price of using magic is higher. They get worn out and damaged (and possibly crazy) faster, which leads them to husband their resources more. The difficulty of accomplishing some of the bigger things with Thaumaturgy is increased, meaning that, if you want to do this, you’re going to be spending more time, more effort, and taking a bigger risk to get it done. I think it’s a very nice balance that lets a Wizard accomplish almost anything if they have the time, materials, and dedication, but limits what they can do within the game to things that are simpler and don’t step on the toes of the other characters.

That’s about all I’ve got for now. I haven’t finished reading both books (did I mention 700 pages?), but plan to do that this weekend. So far, I am very impressed with what I’ve got in hand. Kudos to the folks at Evil Hat for putting together such a fantastic game, and thanks again to Fred for making these files available to us playtesters.

It’s been a while since my last post. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening with the playtest, though. Here’s what we’re looking at:

I’m starting two play tracks next week, each running for three sessions, the first on successive Mondays, and the second on successive Fridays. I’ve asked my playtesters to pick either Mondays or Fridays, and to tell me what characters they’re going to play. I’ve heard back from about half so far.

I’m creating two adventures, each set to run three sessions, and customizing them to the characters to make sure we can let them strut their stuff (and, incidentally, stress test the rules that apply to them). I should have those finished up this weekend.

After each session, I’ll post an account of what went on, what neat things we found we could do with the rules, and anything else that seems to merit conversation.

In the meantime, there are some other folks out there writing about the playtest, as well. You should check out these links:

Tonight was the first supernatural character creation session. It went very well. I had four people attend this evening, and we came up with five characters. Two of the character concepts did not fit the structure of the Supernatural Stunts chapter, but they were both very easy to house-rule in. Took maybe five minutes of discussion, total. I like that sort of robustness in a system.

What were they? One was a ghost, which winds up with a 0 Refresh Rate after all the required stunts. Easy enough to make one of the stunts optional, giving the player a Refresh of 1, and therefor a playable character. The other was a ghoul, which necessitated creating a new permission and deciding what other powers he should have. Easy. Done.

The rules so far stick very close to canon, but have a flexibility that easily allows one to extrapolate and house-rule things. With a little bit of thought and comparison, it’s easy to fit pretty much any concept that fits in the Dresdenverse into the structure and build it for a PC.

So, as a treat for those of you who have been waiting, here’s the first supernatural character to be posted. It’s a supernatural remix of Crazy Tom, one of my mundane characters. I did this to see how the system handled it. I wound up with an interesting pair of characters – supernatural Crazy Tom is more powerful, but mundane Crazy Tom is more resourceful. I like it.

I don’t want to get into too much detail in this report; I still have another group of players to run through the conflicts. Some general observations:

Conflict in this game, physical or otherwise, is very much narrative-driven. This is a real change in perspective for players who are used to D&D’s very mechanics-driven combat system. It requires a different way of looking at conflict.

No matter what the system, a sucky roll is a sucky roll, and it can still make you sad. Or dead.

Getting to choose your own injuries and consequences is a very interesting choice. Watching someone try to decide where the machete hit them or how bad the bikers scared them is a lot of fun.

The key to conflicts in this system seems to be co-operation. One character (or more) uses a maneuver to stick someone with an Aspect, and then the finisher comes in, tags the Aspect(s), and strikes home.

On Friday, I’m running the conflicts with the rest of the group. Once I get everyone’s feedback and have consolidated it and forwarded it to Evil Hat, I’ll post a more specific report.Â I’m not sure how much detail I can include, but I’ll tell you what I can. I just don’t want to give away anything for the other group, or prejudice their comments too much.

Just want to let you folks know the status of things, and our plans for the playtest over the next couple of weeks.

First, a couple of days ago, Evil Hat sent us two background chapters on the Dresdenverse. One is a Who’s Who of characters from the books, and the other is sort of a monster chapter – info on the types of bad guys that might come up.Â I’ve distributed those to my playtesters, and we’re currently reading through them. They were written by Chad Underkoffler, who also used to write for Unknown Armies, so I know they’re going to be solid stuff.

Second, just tonight, Evil Hat sent us the chapter on supernatural stunts. There’s still the chapter on spellcasting and the one on artifacts to come, but this really puts us in a good position to start seeing how the magic works in the game.

Now, my plans.

Next week, I’m running a couple of sessions using only the mundane characters that have been created. It’s just a test of the conflict system – not a full game. So, I’m going to try to run one physical, one mental, and one social conflict in each session. If possible, we’ll rerun one or two of them, to see what effect different choices make.

A week or two after that, we’re going to get together and create supernatural characters, using the new rules.

Once that’s done, we’re actually going to run a couple of games – maybe two or three session arcs, seeing how the whole thing fits together. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to.

So, that’s what you can expect to see about the DFRPG over the next little while.

Oh, and I’ll continue posting characters as I receive them from my playtesters. I know it’s tough to wait, but it can be even tougher to get them to send them to me.

Okay, we know I’ve started this blog primarily to talk about the Dresden Files RPG. But why am I so hot about the game? And the books? And even the TV series?

Being obsessively introspective, as well as fascinated by story in general, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

On the surface, the series doesn’t seem to do anything really new. Magic in the modern world. C.S. Lewis did that in The Magician’s Nephew. Heinlein did it in Glory Road. Peter Beagle did it in Folk of the Air. But that’s okay. There are no really new ideas anymore; I’m pretty sure the Greeks used them all up by the time Aristotle got around to writing his Poetics. Stories may spring from ideas, but ideas aren’t the real driving force of stories.

Stories run on three engines: plot, character, and theme. Ideas can affect any of those three, and usually do, but it’s the end result that we look for. Pulp stories like Doc Savage are big on plot. Things like Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are all about character. Theme-driven stories usually get lumped into more literary categories, but Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm are good examples.

Okay. So now I’ve defined my terms. Let’s talk about Harry.

Plot:

The plots are decent, if not stellar. They’re no better or worse than the plots in the average mystery novel. If I had to pick a mystery author to compare them to, plot-wise, I’d probably pick Robert B. Parker. Nice twists and turns, a decent number of surprises, no cheats, and it often ends in mayhem. Now, nothing else about the books is really similar to Parker’s writing, but the complexity and solid construction of the plots are about equal.

They are well-served by the rich setting of the books. You’ve got the normal people of the world, including cops, gangsters, coroners, geeks, students, bartenders, store clerks, and anything else you might want. You’ve got the wizards, three types of vampire, four or five types of werewolf, faeries by the bucketful, many ghosts, demons, fallen angels, and even three holy knights wielding magic swords. Add the spirit world (the “Nevernever,” in the books’ parlance) to Chicago’s rich real geography, and season the whole thing with many contracts, grudges, secret deals, and death curses, and there’s a real wealth of material for the plots.

Jim makes good use of it, too. Ten books in, and the plots are still new and engrossing, with interesting elements added every book, and established elements developed further. It’s one of those series whose stories really reward being read in sequence – it’ll draw you on, book by book, to the end.

Now, that said, they’re standard mystery plots. You know there’s going to be a bad guy, and that your first couple of guesses as to what’s going on and who’s doing it are going to be wrong. That’s okay, though. The plots are serviceable and enjoyable, but they aren’t what I read them for.

Theme:

The themes in the Dresden books are good ones. Deep ones. Universal ones.

What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be human? Does power always corrupt? Do the means justify the ends? What is the nature of family? And always, where do you draw your line?

Lots of other books, movies, comics, and other media deal with all these questions, as well. Why? Because they fascinate us. They help us understand choices people make, both in fiction and in real life. They help us decide about ourselves.

Jim handles these in a very smart manner. Harry, the hero of the books, is constantly faced with the questions, and we get to see him struggle with the decision, and the consequences of his choices. That’s good. But the really good part is that the books have other characters facing the same questions and making different choices. We get to see the path not taken, and we can decide whether or not Harry made the right choice. Or if there is a right choice.

See? Smart.

Still, nothing really new here. Just handled well. Sort of like the plots.

Characters:

The main focus of the books is the wizard Harry Dresden. They’re written in the first person, and he’s our viewpoint character. And he’s pretty great.

Sure, in the beginning of the series, he’s a pretty standard archetype of the smart-mouthed PI, with the mystical ability to level buildings thrown in. But as the series develops, you get to see behind his facade. You begin to understand why he’s a smart-mouth. You understand why he’s working as a PI. You understand why, even though he can level buildings, he tries really hard not to. And the reasons are things we can understand and even, in a way, relate to. You learn that he has a code that he follows, one that even he doesn’t admit to. You know the pain that drives him, and the struggle he endures between what he could be and what he should be.

He also has what is, in my opinion, the single most telling trait of a literary hero: the ability to get back up one more time than he’s knocked down.

In true noire tradition, he regularly gets the crap kicked out of him physically, mentally, and spiritually. And yet, he still finds the strength and the reason to crawl back from the pit and face the bad guy. And win.

In a way, he reminds me of a more powerful, less cynical version of my favourite modern fantasy hero, John Constantine of the Hellblazer comics. He knows what he thinks is right, and he won’t quit until he wins, no matter what they do to him. Because he’s fighting the good fight.

The supporting characters in the book sort of work the same way. When you first meet them, they are typical, if interesting, stereotypes. As their role in the story progresses, they grow and develop, without ever losing what made them interesting in the first place. Murphy, the tough-as-nails female cop shows why she tries so hard, and how hard she works to survive in the world of the Chicago Police Department. Charity Carpenter, who hates Harry, becomes much more real when you understand her love of her husband (he saved her from a dragon, after all) and children, and her fears that Harry is going to get her husband killed. Even Thomas, the whimsical sex vampire, has reasons for his on-again, off-again alliance with Harry that make sense.

In short, Jim did his homework. He fleshed out the characters the way you need them to be fleshed out if you want them to be real to the reader. He starts you off with a quick sketch, then fills in all the backstory you need to make sense of them.

Conclusion:

So, decent plots, decent themes, better-than-average characters. How does that add up to my addiction to the series?

Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you read a book where the author did everything well, and some things superbly?

I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself overlooking certain flaws because of strengths in other areas. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books have decent plots, decent characters, but rehash the same theme of honour and masculinity in every book, usually with long conversations between Spenser and Susan. Still good books. David Eddings’s Belgariad series had a moderately interesting theme, very rich characters, but only enough plot to get you from one character moment to the next. Pretty much all of Heinlein’s stories had grand, expansive themes, rollicking plots, and characters so flat you could slide them under a door. Same thing with Asimov.

So along comes a series with no real weaknesses, and one telling strength. Of course I like it.

And there’s another reason, that has more to do with writing style than story. They’re quick reads. I blast through one of them in a day or so, without stealing time away from work or other responsibilities. Sure, I like the dense stuff, too, but I like it when a book takes me by the hand and says, “Sit down. Relax. No pressure. Here’s a fun story that’ll take no effort. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

See, I managed to get my gaming group in on the early alpha playtest of the Dresden Files RPG, by the folks at Evil Hat Productions. They do good games over there; check ’em out if you haven’t. It uses their FATE system, which they also used in Spirit of the Century, which is probably the smoothest, coolest, most true-to-the-source pulp game I have ever seen.

Lemme back up a bit.

The Dresden Files are a series of modern fantasy novels by Jim Butcher. They deal with Harry Dresden, a Chicago wizard who advertises in the yellow pages. Hilarity ensues. They’re fun books; Jim has really struck a balance between an updated noire detective story and an urban fantasy world worthy of Charles de Lint or Emma Bull. There are currently nine books in the series, with a tenth due out in April of this year. If the idea of a modern Phillip Marlowe battling the forces of darkness appeals to you at all, I say pick ’em up.

The novels also spawned a TV series that lasted a season. It wasn’t without its charm, but it wasn’t as well done as the books.

Anyway, I found out that the rpg license for the series had been bought by a little company called Evil Hat Productions. This worried me. Licensed properties are always kind of shaky in the rpg world, and I had never heard of Evil Hat prior to this. But they also advertised this cool pulp game called Spirit of the Century, so I decided to buy it and see what kind of chops they had.

Wow.

Blew me away. Completely.

After a single reading of the Spirit of the Century rules, I went from worried to ecstatic. These guys knew their stuff. Their thinking about game design, about what made for fun mechanics, about how mechanics fueled story, all of it: rock solid. Much of it even brilliant. Some of it revolutionary.

So, when I ran into Fred Hicks and Leonard Balsera at GenCon this year (Aaah, who am I kidding? I deliberately went looking for them!) and begged them to tell me when Dresden Files would be released, they took pity on me and told me to contact them later about playtesting.

Now, I’ve done playtesting before. I’ve even written and sold a fair amount of game material for D&D and Unknown Armies. So I leaped at the chance, and they decided that they would like input from me and my game group.

There’s a bit of a catch, though: instead of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I had to sign a Disclosure Pledge, saying that I would talk about the game, and some of the stuff I see, in public, on the web, etc. They want me (and all the other early alpha playtesters) to talk about our experiences with the playtest, so that people start to see the way the game is shaping up and get excited.

And there’s some neat stuff to get excited about, lemme tell you.

So, over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about the playtest here. Keep an eye out for some tidbits that have come out of our experiences, and for some general comments about the game and the process.

I’m not going to post the playtest documents, of course; they don’t belong to me and they’re not finished.